On 2024-07-11 06:07 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 7/11/24 03:44, Brooks Harris wrote:
On 2023-03-02 04:47 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
Presumably ESA's boffins are on top of this.....
Researchers more precisely calculate how much faster time passes on the moon https://phys.org/news/2024-07-precisely-faster-moon.html
That news article says "the team found that time on the moon ticks by at 0.0000575 seconds faster per day (57.50 µs/d) than it does on Earth."
But the paper <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.16147> says this figure needs to be adjusted for the total orbital energies for the Earth and Moon, and later gives an adjusted figure of "56.02 μs/d, with the clock on the Moon’s surface running faster by that amount compared to a terrestrial clock. Additionally, there are periodic terms, the largest of which is due to the lunar orbit around the Earth that amounts to about 30.95 μs/d ...".
Clearly precise lunar timekeeping will not be a trivial matter.
It's still not clear to me what the relationship between the ESA and NASA is on this. Will there be a single standard for lunar timekeeping, or multiple standards? Will this be like the squabbles over the Prime Median in the 19th century?
Is there a Prime Meridian on the Moon? Will there be Lunar Time Zones?